NMS Editorial Team

NMS Editorial Team

ChatGPT Is the New Media Kit, and Creators Figured It Out First

Fashion creator Andrew Polo gave one interview to HealthCentral about managing eczema. ChatGPT and Claude now recommend him for eczema-related queries, and his inbound brand inquiries jumped 50%, with Cetaphil and O'Keeffe's among the brands reaching out. His TikTok following grew just 1.5% over the

Funnel visualization showing new signups narrowing to activated users, with a 30 percent activation rate marker and users leaking out mid-funnel

Activation Rate Is the Metric Your Funnel Is Missing

Activation rate is the percentage of new signups who reach your product's core value moment within a fixed window, usually 3 to 7 days. Median B2B SaaS activation sits near 30 percent, which means most funnels lose two out of three signups after the conversion event marketing celebrates.

Isometric illustration of CRM contact data flowing from office buildings into a shared data pool, with a toggle switch stuck on and a magnifying glass over contract fine print

HubSpot Reversed Its Data Grab in 4 Days (the Plan Survived)

HubSpot announced terms on July 1, 2026 that would have pooled customer CRM enrichment data, including names, job titles, work emails, and email deliverability signals, across customer accounts by default. It reversed the change on July 5 after four days of public backlash. The authorizing language had been sitting in

Pop art illustration of a Google Ads bidding dial turned up from a 5 dollar CPA price tag toward 10 dollars, next to an August 17 calendar page

Your Target CPA Is About to Become Your Actual CPA

Starting August 17, 2026, Google Ads will make budget-limited campaigns on Target CPA or Target ROAS deliver at their stated targets instead of beating them. A campaign set to a $10 CPA that has been converting at $5 will drift toward the full $10. The Bid Target Adjustment Tool, live

Retro newsprint infographic of email marketing strategy as four layers: deliverability stamp, list cleanup, automation gears, and a complaint gauge under 0.1%

Email Marketing Strategy Guide: Build It in the Right Order

An email marketing strategy is built in four layers, in order: deliverability, list health, automation, then measurement. Email still returns roughly $36 to $40 for every $1 spent, but that average hides a hard gate: since February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo reject bulk mail that fails authentication or crosses a

Isometric illustration of robot crawlers queuing at a toll turnstile before an ad-supported webpage, one paying a coin while a barrier arm blocks the rest

Cloudflare Just Flipped the Default: AI Crawlers Pay or Stay Out

Cloudflare announced on July 1, 2026 that it will block "mixed-use" AI crawlers by default on any page that carries ads, starting September 15, 2026. The new default applies to new customers, new sites from existing customers, and all free-tier accounts. Cloudflare also replaced Pay Per Crawl with

Blueprint-style diagram of ChatGPT splitting into two search pipelines, with Thinking mode fanning out into a dense network of cited documents while Instant mode cites few

ChatGPT's Thinking Mode Replaces 75% of the Sources It Cites

Semrush and Kevin Indig ran 100 identical prompts through ChatGPT twice, once in Instant mode and once in Thinking mode, and only 25.6% of the cited domains showed up in both. Reddit's citation share fell from 15% to 7% the moment reasoning switched on, while government and